Maggie's Farm

The word “Forgery” has to be used with caution. Yes, it means a piece of art, which is offered as having been made by one person, when in fact it was made by someone else. This deliberate misrepresentation of the identity of the creator is a crime. But which crime? Probably fraud; telling a lie to make money. Most people don’t know this, but many famous works of art were begun by an understudy, and then completed by the master. Is that fraud? Probably, but since there’s no historical record, the issue is moot. Now let’s consider “Piracy”. That’s the claim that an unlicensed Van Halen T Shirt is a forgery. Well, the t-shirt is real, so you can’t say that it’s fake. But I.P. Attorneys claim that an unlicensed t-shirt is both a forgery, because it was not made by an approved company; and also fake, because the shirt itself misrepresents its origins. But in order for this argument to be valid, the customer would have to care whether the I.P. Holder was paid for granting permission to make the shirt. And there is the problem. Nobody cares about copyright claims. The I.P. Attorneys do not enjoy social sanction. On the contrary, most people think that paying money, simply for permission to write something, is ridiculous. The I.P. holder isn’t offering any added value. I.P. is simply a communication tax, and a form of censorship. What’s happened is that the I.P. Attorneys are attempting to pull a semantic trick. They want “unlicensed” to mean “illegitimate” to mean “illegal” to mean “fake”. But if copyright is automatically applied to everything, then freedom of speech would be not only be illegal (because you are accidentally repeating what someone else has already said at some point in recorded history) but also fake (because as a lawbreaker, a copyright violator doesn’t have a legitimate place in society anyway. He’s a criminal, and a pretender.